Truelight of Galway, a Real 'Hooker': Schooner Days MLXVIII (1068)

by C. H. J. Snider

GALWAY, Port of the

Strangers, AD 1952.

PASS through the Spanish Arch in the old city wall and we are in this oldest harbor known on the west coast of Ireland.

Ptolemy called it Ausoba in his chart before AD 100 was written. Probably Phoenicians came here in quinqueremes of Tyre. Perhaps 2000 BC.

At any rate we are in the oldest part of Ireland's oldest harbor. To the West is the Claddagh, meaning the Beach, where the first galleys and coracles and corraghs were drawn ashore in the dawn of time, and where thousands and thousand of fishing boats have landed since their catch and dried their nets.

Oh the whitewashed walls of a row of two-story houses on one of the quays, newly washed bedding hangs to dry from windowsill to windowsill; the painted sails and triumphant banners of housekeeping.

Opposite, the brick Claddagh National Piscatory School for the harbor children proclaims the purpose of this part of the port. It was devoted to fish, and the boys and girls were taught to net and knit and knot and splice as well as spell, read and cipher.

Petrol and power have made changes in fishing media, but here are still to be found types going back to Columbus. He had Galway men in his crews.

Who of us hasn't used the word "hooker?" We talk of stone hookers and lumber-hookers and sand-hookers, and old hookers, and stiff hookers, and just plain hookers, and we don't mean horned cattle. But who knows what we mean by it exactly? Except the thirsty soul to whom a "stiff hooker" means a strong drink in large quantity?

Can one person in a hundred describe one?

Here in Galway as in Connemara, we have the real thing before our eyes, surviving after centuries of use of the name. It as spelled "howker" in books three hundred years old.

Martin Oliver of No. 13 Claddagh Quay, Galway, is fitting out his hooker Truelight for herring fishing. Let's walk around and take a look at her.

She lies like a great black bat against the quay wall. Even her sails, hoisted for airing, are black. Not from age, but because they have been tanned and treated with a thin mixture of Stockholm tar to prevent mildew.

Her sides shine with fresh tar too. The sombreness is relieved by a clean band of grey above her gunwale. She looks all the blacker for the armada of great white Galway swans, which have sailed in stately convoy to her part of the harbor.

It is feeding time for them and they know it. A dear dame has driven down in her car to the grassy tidal margin, and is tossing bread-crusts judiciously from a well-filled bag. She has names for them all, like farm poultry. She calls them, urging Sally not to dally, and Louey not to be lazy, and George to be a gentleman and wait until William, who has a broken wing, can come up. William waves his mangled stump, which may feather out again, and gets his share. But the lady bountiful says he may never rise from the harbor.

Martin Oliver says he has sailed the Truelight forty miles in three hours and forty minutes with a leading wind. That is very good maximum speed for her inches. She has fine lines and clean, and a raking keel. She is 33 feet over all, 28 on the keel, 16 feet beam, and draws 5 feet even in ballast. We can see her ballast through the open hatch; flat pieces of blue limestone-bedded in sand. We can see her ribs, too, double the thickness in the bilge that they are below. She has great freeboard, sweeping up like a caravel to seven feet at the stemhead and five at the head of the rudder. It is hung outside the neatly turned and raking transom stern.

Her most noticeable feature is the tumble-home, which pinches in her sides like a pair of corsets. Above her grey-painted weatherboards amidships she is a foot narrower than she is at the gunwale, only twelve inches below.

With her high freeboard this gives her a dragon-like appearance viewed from forward. It is heightened by the horn-like bollards projecting from stem and stern, and by the weatherboards dying down to nothing before they reach the bow.

The stem, curved backward, rises like the horse's head of a Viking galley. The bowsprit, a chunky young tree, spears out on the port side of the stern. It can be run in quickly. It has to be to avoid collisions in small coastal harbors, packed with craft.

A rope bobstay, passing under a roller and belayed on a cleat on the stemhead, hogs the bowsprit down. The jib is set flying. There is no jibstay.

The forestaysail is laced to the stout forestay with a wide space between. The mainsail has no hoops but is laced to the mast, with 18 inches of drift between the tack of the sail and the spar.

The black mainsail is loose foot, but it has a long boom and high-peaked gaff.

Hookers or howkers used to have a loosefooted mainsail, without a boom and bailing to the mast, but that rig is obsolete. The Truelight's weatherboards are scored with hundreds of grooves worn by fishing lines. They catch both herring and mackerel here by handlining. Hookers are not used as trawlers.

There are dozens of other quaint craft like the Truelight in the turf trade. They carry three to ten-ton loads of peat sods, the summer and winter fuel of Ireland, from the bogs of Connemara to fuelless islands. They fill their peat cargo high above their weatherboards. Turf is a light cargo. In return they can get a cargo of seaweed or kelp, which is used as fertilizer, or potatoes or calves or even bulls.

Sometimes these hookers stay at sea two weeks at a time, though they are practically open boats. They are decked across forward, and under that deck two or three men and a boy live. There is not much room in the cuddy or forepeak. The deck is close to the floor and across the bulkhead is the cooking hearth. Its peat fire is "spared" by covering with ashes. Bread is baked in a pot over it. There is no chimney. The smoke has to escape from a narrow open hatch—when the downdraught from the foresail allows it to do so. So the naturally rosy complexions of the hooker men are smoke-tanned to a rich mahogany, summer and winter.

Now, at least, we know what a real hooker is, don't we?